Battle of Montisgard With the abandonment of the joint Jerusalem-Byzantine invasion of Egypt and the campaigning transferring to the north, Baldwin IV was left without a sufficient force to oppose Saladin as he moved into Judea with a large army. Once his army began looting, however, it lost cohesion. Baldwin came out from behind the walls of Ashkelon and fell on Saladin at Mont Gisard. With their forces dispersed and having to execute a retreat in the face of the enemy, the rout of the Ayyubids was on.

BALDWIN IV., the son of Amalric I. by his first wife Agnes, ruled in Jerusalem from 1174 to 1183, when he had his nephew Baldwin crowned in his stead. Educated by William of Tyre, Baldwin IV. came to the throne at the early age of thirteen; and thus the kingdom came under the regency of Raymund II. of Tripoli. Happily for the kingdom whose king was a child and a leper, the attention of Saladin was distracted for several years by an attempt to wrest from the sons of Nureddin the inheritance of their father- an attempt partially successful in 1174, but only finally realized in 1183. The problems of the reign of Baldwin IV. may be said to have been two- his sister Sibylla and the fiery Raynald of Chatillon, once prince of Antioch through marriage to Constance (1153-1159), then a captive for many years in the hand of the Mahommedans, and since 1176 lord of Krak (Kerak), to the east of the Dead Sea. Sibylla was the heiress of the kingdom; the problem of her marriage was important. Married first to William of Montferrat, to whom she bore a son, Baldwin, she was again married in 1180 to Guy of Lusignan; and dissensions between Sibylla and her husband on the one side, and Baldwin IV. on the other, troubled the latter years of his reign. Meanwhile Raynald of Krak took advantage of the position of his fortress, which lay on the great route of trade from Damascus and Egypt, to plunder the caravans (1182), and thus helped to precipitate the inevitable attack by Saladin. When the attack came, Guy of Lusignan was made regent by Baldwin IV., but he declined battle and he was consequently deposed both from his regency and from his right of succession, while Sibylla's son by her first husband was crowned king as Baldwin V. in 1183. For a time Baldwin IV. still continued to be active; but in 1184 he handed over the regency to Raymund of Tripoli, and in 1185 he died.

[S336463] Medieval Lands: A prosopography of medieval European noble and royal families, Charles Cawley, (Online: The Foundation for Medieval Genealogy at http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/, 20XX), "BAUDOUIN of Jerusalem (1161-Mar 1185, bur Jerusalem, Church of the Holy Sepulchre)" at http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/JERUSALEM.htm#_ftnref191.

[S420] The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land, Thomas Asbridge, (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 301.

[S420] The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land, Thomas Asbridge, (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 307.

[S420] The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land, Thomas Asbridge, (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 331-32.
"Around mid-May 1185 Baldwin IV died at the age of just twenty-three, and was buried alongside his father Almaric in the Holy Sepulchre. For much of his troubled reign Baldwin struggled with a nightmarish predicament - aware that he was incapable of ruling effectively, yet unable to secure an acceptable replacement or to orchestrate a successful transfer of power, even as the threat of Muslim invasion increased. Throughout he showed great physical courage in enduring his disability."

[S419] God's Wolf: The Life Of The Most Notorious Of All Crusaders, Reynald de Chatillon, Jeffrey Lee, (London: Atlantic Books, 2016), 226.
"In the spring of 1185, the poor leper finally died. He was twenty-three years old. Despite his terrible disease he had bravely, and at the cost of great personal suffering, managed to maintain the kingdom intact against the menace of Saladin."